Sunday, March 29, 2009

Singapore Island. Now a complete concentration camp

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Singapore's state controlled newspaper the Straits Times in its online edition of March 23, 2009 has the article "More Powers to Police". It says Wong Kan Seng, the Minister for Home Affairs of Singapore has tabled a motion in Parliament to enact a law called the Public Order Act. It will make any protest however small and however peaceful illegal unless one obtains a permit from the government. But Lee Kuan Yew's oligarchy has never granted even a single permit in the country's entire history, unless of course the protest is to praise Lee and his government. What this means of course is there is no hope for anyone to protest publicly about anything. And not only that, the law will also make the filming of police brutality, which always occurs in the rare instances of protests.

One can see why this government is resorting to such a universal grip on power. They are afraid. Singapore economy is doing badly. People are being thrown out of jobs with no support from the government. With no one to turn to in this concrete jungle, Lee Kuan Yew fears there may be protests when the people have no other recourse. He realizes that more and more people are beginning to hate, yes hate, this government, when the ministers pay themselves the highest salaries in the world, when the poor can hardly manage to feed their children. And protests in a situation like this makes the position of this government extremely tenuous.

Many activists have been successful in exposing police brutality and the misuse of police powers by filming the arrests and posting the pictures of the police officers on the Internet. Pictures of DSP Hasssan who arrested Dr. Chee Soon Juan for peacefully protesting at the World Bank meeting, pictures of ASP Abdul Razak Zakaria who arrested me and those who wore T shirts with kangaroo pictures; these men have been identified and exposed. These officers must have begun to have the jitters as to what will happen to them if there was a change in government? Will they be held to account? So the law to keep their identities secret in the dirty work they do.

This law not only makes protesting illegal, the police are given wide powers to do anything they want. Literally anything. They can question you on mere suspicion regardless of whether there was any basis for it, they can prevent you going about your business on the pretext that you were going to a protest meeting, they can tap your phones, they can search you for no rime or reason.

Singapore today is a one party state with Lee Kuan Yew in absolute control. It's media is owned and controlled by the state. Even though the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression, you have no such rights. The judiciary is corrupt and beholden to Lee Kuan Yew and his government. And finally this. Whereas previously you were allowed to peacefully protest if you were not more than four, now even if you wanted to stand alone holding up a placard, you will be running foul of the law.

And that is why I say it is a complete concentration camp with one exception. You could not have escaped from Auswitch or Dachau. But you can from Singapore if you want. This is the only difference between Hitler's concentration camps and Singapore.

Just as a guard at Auswitch can ask you to move along, Singapore police can do the same. The guards at Auswitch can pass any law they want; Lee Kuan Yew can do the same. In Auswitch you are allowed only to read Hitler's propaganda; same in Singapore where you get to read only the state controlled news papers. In Auswitch, the guards can punish you in any way they want; same in Singapore with Lee Kuan Yew's judges, such as Judge Belinda Ang Saw Ean, who are dying to do anything for him. In Auswitch you may be able to get by and live out your life, by keeping your mouth shut and dutifully obeying your orders; same in Singapore, you can live a quiet life by being an obedient dog.

Lee Kuan Yew has got it all wrong this time. This sort of control is not going to work. People are escaping from the island, or rather they are emigrating in droves, yes droves. They are going to Australia and other democracies not wanting to live in a concentration camp. Children are not being born in sufficient numbers and without the relentless import of foreign migrants from the neighbouring impoverished countries, Singaporean population would have shrunk.

No educated man or woman in his right mind would want to tolerate this. This law has finally broken the camel's back. I do not believe that Singaporeans will take this nonsense anymore from this 86 year old tyrant.

Any human has a tolerance threshold beyond which he will not endure. I believe, that threshold has been reached with this law. I expect things to begin to change with the people taking the law into their own hands since they cannot get any justice from this government.

Singapore may have modern skyscrapers and manicured lawns. But these things does not in any way make Singapore anything other than a true concentration camp with the prison guards (Singapore police) free to do anything they want to you. Your only choice is to obey anything you are told to do. I am not sure, even with Singaporeans being the most tolerant and obedient people on this planet would be willing to accept a life such as this.

Your letters are welcome. We reserve the right to publish your letters. Please Email your letters to nair.gopalan@yahoo.com And if you like what I write, please tell your friends. You will be helping democracy by distributing this widely. This blog not only gives information, it dispels government propaganda put out by this dictatorial regime.

This is a quote from a blogger who was threatened with death by a police officer in Singapore:----------------------------------Gary: He said to me at the lift lobby 90% of the exact words - ”Mr Tan,if you walk out of here tomorrow,you might get killed.You might meet with a mysterious accident,you might disappear and nobody will know what happened to you! Mr Tan, some things and people in this country you cannot offend! Some people are above all things! You better make sure you know this! Mr Tan,we can arrange for things to happen to you.You understand or not!”---------------------------------That says it all. They think it's going to work?

When I heard from a friend working in the civil service that there might be a change in the cabinet this week, I was quietly hoping that Prime Lee Hsien Loong will make use of the opportunity to trim the cabinet by removing the dead wood to reduce government expenditure during this economic downturn.

I was bitterly disappointed and flabbergasted that save for one departure - Dr Lee Boon Yang, there will be one new Senior Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister in Prime Minister’s Office in addition to the present incumbents.

Why does our honorable Mr Lee Hsien Loong, who is the highest paid Prime Minister in the world need 2 Senior Ministers, 2 Deputy Prime Ministers, 1 Minister Mentor and 3 Ministers in his office to help him govern a small nation of only 4.5 million people?

Will he be handicapped in any way by having less ministers to assist him?

Mr Lee should have sacked the underperforming ministers such as his father MM Lee for GIC’s disastrous performance

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, sorry I meant Lee Hsien Loong, has “reshuffled his Cabinet” to carry out “leadership renewal”. When “leadership renewal” is mentioned, the first thought in most people’s minds will be the retirement of several old leaders, and new blood being brought up. Unfortunately, for Singapore’s politics, retirement of leaders usually means becoming Senior Minister.

Most of us, being Internet savvy and reading in English, are younger and more educated. We know how to vote wisely. But we are not enough. 66.6% of our country does not vote wisely. They are either ill-informed or they hold the ruling party to the wrong standards when voting.

More worryingly, this 66.6% may have increased since the last election. We have gained many new citizens in our country, so 66.6% may be 75% now.

I appeal to all patriots. For this upcoming election, we need to convince two major groups to vote more wisely. We need to talk to them. They are the Elderly Voters (our Elders) and New Citizens.

Understand Our History before trying to persuade our Elders

Younger voters tend to forget the events that forged Singapore as an independent nation. It is important to remember our history, because it determines how our Elders vote.

PAP was not the party it is today. PAP was the party that smart people should vote for, the party that opposed racial politics in Malaysia.

Many early PAP ministers were wise and hardworking. Back then a certain un-nameable person had not yet ‘persuaded’ his colleagues to ‘retire’, so PAP had not yet morphed into its modern form. It still included many people who had abilities to contribute.

The meritocratic (not mere-ly-autocratic) policies of the early PAP were vital towards nation building. As younger voters, we must not forget this history when trying to persuade our elders to vote wisely.

We must convince our Elders that we are not immature kids who (as Jack Neo has satirized), are stupid or know nothing. We know PAP was benevolent in the past. We know it did good things and achieved much and had caring ministers. We acknowledge that the PAP cells in our young national body were good for growing the body.

Younger voters may dismiss cancer out of hand. But I am old enough to go for cancer screening. Let me remind all that normal cells can turn into malignant cancerous cells as we age. We cannot keep voting for the same cells if these cells have turned cancerous. We must convince our Elders about this.

Persuade our Elders to vote with the Right Expectations

We must explain to our Elders that they must change with the times. They have a right to expect first world standards in the first class country that they worked to build. They must hold the ruling party to the standards of first world countries. If they don’t want to compare with Western countries, at least they must compare with other first-world Asian lands like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Please explain to your Elders that it is wrong to compare Singapore with Zimbabwe or North Korea or 1930s China or the Philippines or Indonesia. We are not illiterate like the average 1930s Chinese peasant, and we work more hours than the Indonesians. If our Elders insist on making these inappropriate comparisons, then anyone with a PSLE cert should be considered ‘talent’ since basic literacy was respected in 1930s China.

Since we pay more than the average daily wage in Bangladesh to take the MRT to work, we have a right to expect MRT to be far above Bangladeshi super-crowded standards.

Since we pay our top bureaucrats hundreds of times as much as a top Indonesian civil servant, we have a right to expect hundreds of times the quality. (Being corruption free or competent alone doesn’t warrant hundreds of times the salary. Otherwise we should also pay hundreds of times the salary to bus drivers just to drive safely.)

The average citizen will pay the government and its GLCs thousands of dollars in combined GST, electricity bills, conservancy charges and water bills every year. That’s more than what the average Filipino earns during the same period. We have a right to expect our government to do more than the Filipino government.

When our Elders were young, it was common for Chinese people to work like slaves till they dropped dead. Not having a social safety net was acceptable. Letting people starve in the streets or die because they lacked money for healthcare was acceptable. Kowtowing to Angmoh foreign talents walking the streets was acceptable. Having a sense of inferiority as Chinese/ Asian, being the sick man of Asia, was acceptable.

Today, these standards are not acceptable.

Our elders tolerated blood-sucking bedbugs and hair lice in their daily lives. We can no longer tolerate parasites sucking our blood with every ERP gantry. We must persuade our Elders of this fact.

Tell New Citizens that we welcome them – and to vote responsibly

We should not reject or insult new citizens. We should try to understand them and communicate with them. To understand how new citizens feel, let me tell you my personal story.

My parents came to Singapore at independence. They didn’t want to live under a regime that discriminated on the basis of race. Singapore offered more Hope. Not money (Singapore did not even have a currency of its own), not jobs (back then, what jobs? We did not even have ‘New Towns’ to live in), not food (many people thought we would literally starve to death; back then the price of rice was very worrying to many immigrants). HOPE!

We are patriotic people. When Marine Parade was built, my parents proudly took me to see those impressive new buildings. It took several trips on SBS buses. I got to collect multiple bus tickets.

(Remember, those good old days, frens n bruders? SBS still employed bus conductors and was un-airconded but relatively un-crowded? Now these ex-conductors have become karang guni ah peks barely making a living.)

At Marine Parade I was afraid to go near those buildings because I thought they might collapse on me. My parents pushed me forward to show that Government was Good, it built Quality things that won’t collapse on you.

When I served NS, we did not yet have the manpower shortages that the 2-child policy would create. I was labeled non-combat fit. I actually got MO to upgrade me because I wanted to serve my country.

Don’t call me stupid for doing NS as a chong sua chow private. That was in the good old 80s. When they broadcast 雾锁南洋 (The Awakening), 五脚基 (The Five Foot Way) and that kind of stuff which we were so proud of. When nearly all Sinkies wanted to get tickets for the NDP at the Kallang Stadium. Before the internet started revealing things behind this façade of perfection.

My most patriotic friends/ contemporaries are those who have parents born abroad. For their parents, Singapore wasn’t about ‘claiming FT and acting big’ or ‘taking jobs from locals’. It was about putting down roots in a land where all citizens had equal rights. The Singapore of the 1960s-1980s.

Over the years, what has happened? One by one – the so-called Marxist Conspiracy, right to appeal to the Privy Council abolished, constitutional changes pushed through, outrageous rulings by CJ Yong Pung How, ex-SAF personnel appointed to civilian institutions in dual career tracks, President Ong Teng Chong’s death and the hasty cremation without autopsy, Cheng San election with blank ballots inside the box, Goh Chok Tong’s threats against voters who vote against him, Singnet’s secret computer scanning fiasco in the 1990s… one by one the dominos came tumbling. Revealing that our country is not a first-world modern democracy.

Many new immigrants don’t know our history. They read SPH or see the slick image that Singapore broadcasts abroad with its Singapore job fairs and SIA adverts. Some savvy PRC/ PR students do use us as a free scholarship-stepping stone; some smart angmohs marry Sinkies but retain their original citizenships. But new immigrants who renounced their countries to take on Singapore citizenship basically got suckered into the same bad deal we now have.

Don’t blame these new Sinkies or direct your anger at them. Tell them the truth so that they may learn, and join our side. They are victims too. We need to band together and vote correctly.

No major international news source dares to say the truth about us. Bloomberg, Newsweek, Time, the Economist, the International Herald Tribune, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Asian Wall Street Journal – any and all respected news sources have been sued successfully for libel already. Why blame hapless new citizens who were not cunning or sneaky enough to see through the SPH-controlled press? Don’t create divisions between us and them; it only serves the ruling party’s interests.

We are Singapore, all of us.

Some Sinkies think you must be from an old family and trace your roots back to Tan Tock Seng to belong here. I disagree. Singapore belongs to all of us. We are a nation of immigrants.

Including ‘old’ immigrants who came here to flee China after Mao Zedong took over.

Including ‘new’ immigrants who came right after Singapore became independent.

Including new immigrants who got their ICs earlier this month.

Let’s not create divisions between old, ‘old’, new and ‘new’. Everyone who is not a cancerous cell has a stake in our continued unity and prosperity.

Everyone has a stake in removing the parasites and cancers in our national body.

Everyone has a stake in redistributing our resources away from the parasites and cancerous cells.

We must remove the cancer from our national body which has infected our leadership. We must remove the parasites that running dogs have infected our society with.

I repeat: we must take back our country. Not from new immigrants, not from PRCs or Indians on work permits. But from the cancer within us.

If you were around in the 70s, you should remember our main food scares then. Not imported PRC stuff, but undercooked local cockles - ‘hum’, often infected with parasites carried in feces from the (then) filthy Singapore river. We of that generation have eaten so much undercooked ‘hum’ from the S*** Propagating House and S*** Broadcasting Center (Talk Cock Singsong, if you are too young to remember SBC) that now we are filled with parasites as a nation. We must be rid of parasite-carrying hum. No more hum, real or symbolic, in our daily kway png, murtabak or mee siam. Most important-Lee, we must be rid of our cancer First before it tarries too Long inside us and destroys our nation.

For the upcoming election, vote wisely! And do your best to persuade our Elders and the New Citizens to do likewise!

Thanks for the comment. However history has also shown us in Singapore, for democracy through elections, it will take several generations. Lee Kuan Yew controls everything, never mind how many opposition MPs there are.

What is needed is civil unrest, peaceful civil unrest. And I think that is about to happen. In any case, the voting is rigged.

Here they go again. Every time a constituency has a high percentage of opposition vote, PAP will redraw the boundaries

PAP always used underhand methods to slander good opposition candidates into trouble and sued them into bankruptcy

PAP are the law. They do want they want. How can Singaporeansstill believe in them

So citizens of Singapore please wake up and vote in more oppositions

Many people do not understand why PAP is so afraid to lose elections. Is it the end for PAP if they lose one GRC?

Like sports, do we really so hard up of gold medals. You see public schools have agressive PE tests and activities but then when it comes to regional and international competition, it is the foreigners at the spotlight. WTF

Back to elections, if PAP really wishes to stay in power forever, why not call in the army, put back the uniforms and behave like Myanmar.

Heard it from the grapevine that they'll be merging Bedok with Lim Chu Kang!! If they could incorporate Braddell with Marine Parade, anything is possible with the Lee Regime!!!

Actually if we just reduce 1 MP from each 4/5/6 member GRCs, we will immediately see great savings. Its already proven to work in Jurong GRC which has been working with one -man short since early this year.

Also, I question why there are so many Minister in Prime Minster office - there shld only be one minister in PMO which is the PM

Note: 1. The above pay does not include MP allowances, pensions and other sources of income such as Directorship, Chairmnship, Advisory, Consultancy, etc to Gov-linked and gov-related organisations or foreign MNCs such as Citigroup, etc.2. Though it is based on an estimate, the data cannot be far off the official salary scales.

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About Me

Determined to find the Truth.
Born Singapore, educated Winstedt School 2 (next to Monks Hill in Newton, Singapore) Raffles Institution, National Service, some travel in Europe, then law studies England, return to Singapore, practiced for 10 years, active Workers Party member, stood elections 1988 and 1991 in Singapore, was harassed and persecuted by Lee Kuan Yew for my political beliefs, left for USA, obtained asylum and admitted California State Bar, practice law ever since in Fremont California near San Francisco. Relinquished Singapore citizenship 2005 because I was not prepared to permit Lee Kuan Yew to unjustly retain my CPF funds if I remained Singapore Citizen. On principle, the only correct thing for me to do was to give it up, for my CPF funds. I am an American Citizen as of 2004.